AFFECTED: The Manor Review

The game is called Affected: The Manor.

The game can be played with Oculus Quest 2 or with Oculus Rift + Touch which I am using on my PC. Other than that it’s also available for Gear VR users and on Steam. Being a non-VR player of this game, I am just using the resolution options the game has to offer, i.e. 80% resolution scale reduces the rendering load significantly compared to playing it at 100% resolution.

The game starts by giving you a choice between 3 levels which are also sort of story-related in order but not really since they are all about escaping haunted houses/manors by running away from ghosts and other creatures. After you have selected your level and character, the gameplay starts with a quick tutorial where you’re escaping from a room that is filled with ghosts sitting in chairs.

While running away from that room into a hallway, you trigger the first jump scare by a ghost who pops out of a wall behind you, then it’s time for another tutorial with a closing door which you have to open again by turning the doorknob. After that tutorial section is done, there are no more tutorials for controls or anything else unless you die so many times that it’s time for checkpoint restart.

The mansion looks seemingly abandoned at first with cobwebs all over the place, but you soon find out that there are quite a few ghosts or other creatures living here. The game has several rooms you have to run through, with the number of enemies spawning depending on your chosen difficulty level.

I can’t really say much about the storyline of this game since there isn’t any besides escaping haunted houses for two reasons: 1) You need to go through several houses until you reach the end and 2) there really isn’t any sort of storyline. For example, in the second level, I cannot explain why all of a sudden spiders are spawning or even better, why I have to run through a kitchen while being chased by ghosts-_-

The game has some nice graphics overall for an indie game which you can explain as “8-bit with a modern twist”. While playing the game, I am aware of how it looks like but don’t really care about it at all because I’m too focused on not getting killed by the ghosts chasing me.

The only thing I have to say is that some ghost models are reused several times which makes it look like some sort of animation sequence was missing for some ghosts which are sad, but not the biggest drawback.

I found this game on Steam one day while looking around and decided to try it out since I was bored by playing some other games which are actually AAA titles. And I gotta say that this game seemed pretty nice at first just because it was cheap, but now I can say that it works nicely as a VR game because this type of horror theme seems to work pretty well in VR.

Overall the game has some nice graphics, interesting gameplay mechanics and controls are easy to learn because there’s virtually no control load which is good for people who just want to try out VR games without investing a lot of time learning the controls.

The game is available for HTC Vive, Oculus Rift and Oculus Quest 2 players which is nice to see since not all games are available for every headset. At the moment it’s on sale until June 30th so if you have an Oculus device I would recommend buying it while it’s discounted.

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